Welcome to the Misadventures of Widowhood blog!

In January of 2012 my soul mate of 42 years passed away after nearly 12 years of living with severe disabilities due to a stroke. I survived the first year after Don’s death doing what most widows do---trying to make sense of my world turned upside down. The pain and heartache of loss, my dark humor, my sweetest memories and, yes, even my pity parties are well documented in this blog.

Now that I’m a "seasoned widow" the focus of my writing has changed. I’m still a widow looking through that lens but I’m also a woman searching for contentment, friends and a voice in my restless world. Some people say I have a quirky sense of humor that shows up from time to time in this blog. Others say I make some keen observations about life and growing older. I say I just write about whatever passes through my days---the good, bad and the ugly. Comments welcome and encouraged. Let's get a dialogue going! Jean

Saturday, January 28, 2017

When the noontime news came on TV I realized
I’d been
sitting at my computer all morning. In my full length cranberry colored
L.L. Bean flannel nightgown. And even though more of my body was covered than it would have been if I'd been fully dressed in street wear, I'd still be embarrassed
if someone came
to the door. I’d be even more embarrassed if anyone caught me eating
cereal out
of a coffee cup because I hadn’t run the dishwasher all week. Erma
Bombeck
might understand that I’ve had a busy week and I needed a lazy day but Emily
Post
would not.

I love the free lecture series at the senior hall and this
week it was especially fun because I sat with three others from The Gathering (for
people looking for friends) and we were able to carry on the same laugh-fest we’d
experienced the day before at our monthly meeting. Four of us are starting to gel
as friends. While going out for coffee afterward we talked about the women’s
march and discovered we have similar political views but all of us generally keep
our opinions to ourselves because we’re surrounded by people---including family---who are
Republicans and Pro-Lifers. I’m beginning to think those of us who don’t fit
that description need a secret handshake so we can find each other.

Back to the lecture: In 1926 a heir to a lumber fortunate
built an 11,000 square foot house on 8 ½ acres in my hometown and in addition
to that main house with its 41 rooms he built residences on the estate for a
gatekeeper, a gardener and a chauffeur plus an eight stall garage. It was one
of five homes the owner had around the country including one out East where his
wife and he hobnobbed with the Rockefeller's. It cost 4 ½ million to build and
the landscaped acreage was designed by the same man who did New York’s Central
Park. The house now belongs to a college but before it was donated to them the
furnishings ended up in a high-roller auction in New York. When they cleaned
out the basement, a dumpster was ordered and eight large boxes of records and
blueprints got tossed. They documented all the materials and labor expenses accrued
while building, landscaping and furnishing the place. Even letters and photographs
to and from interior designers traveling Europe looking for things like marble,
light fixtures, flooring, tapestries and silverware were in those boxes.

Enter a dumpster diver who was also a history buff and she recognized
the gold mine contained in the boxes. She donated them to the public museum and
the contents are being cataloged by the guy who gave the lecture. He said
that such a thorough documentation of a 1920s Great Gatsby style house is extremely
rare. It's hard to wrap my head around why people think that kind of extravagance
is going to make them happy and in the case of this house, the guy’s wife died
near the end of project. On a document found in the boxes he wrote, “The house
killed her!” Apparently she was so worn out from trying to make the estate better than
those of her socialite friends that she died from the stress. He didn’t have the
best of luck with wives, his second wife left him for a penniless California surfer and
his third was decades younger than his children and they hated her.

The
day after the "house" lecture I was back to the senior hall. This time for a
field
trip to our public museum. I’ve been there many times but this was no
ordinary
tour. We got to go behind the scenes to buildings and levels generally
not open
to the public where a quarter of a million archived items is housed
including hearses,
stuffed buffaloes, quack medical machines, furniture---you name it,
they’ve got
it. One entire level (almost as big as a football field) contained nothing but
clothing
going back to the 1700s. It was a great tour but tiring with
all the walking
through history we did.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard about the
movie Hidden Figures. I got to see it
recently with my Red Hat Society group of ten and then the next day I had lunch
with my Movie and Lunch Club of fifteen who’d just come from seeing the film. Without
exception everyone absolutely loved it and I can say without reservation that it deserves every award and all the praise
it gets. Here’s how IMBd sums up the storyline: “Based on a true story. A team
of African-American women provide NASA with important mathematical data needed
to launch the program's first successful space missions.” And from Popular Mechanics, “This was a group
made up of mostly women who calculated by hand the complex equations that
allowed space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn to travel
safely to space. Through sheer tenacity, force of will, and intellect, they
ensured their stamp on American history—even if their story has remained
obscured from public view until now.”

The three women featured in the movie were pulled up the ladder from a pool of
thirty who worked in a room labeled, ‘Colored Computers’ (humans computing
figures by hand) in an era when bathrooms, lunch counters and drinking
fountains were separated by race. A NASA historian quoted in the Popular Mechanics article says the
hiring decision was made because they worked cheater than their male
counterparts and he also says the film is pretty much on target accurate in all
it depicts. That being said, my esteem for John Glenn rose even more after
seeing this movie and reading the Popular Mechanics article.
Isn’t it a sad statement on our society, though, that it took President Obama
giving Katherine Johnson---the protagonists in the film and a real life hero---The
Presidential Medal of Freedom (11/15) before most people even knew about this
chapter in Black History, Woman’s History and Space History!

There’s one scene in the movie that had me and my movie
companions all crying. Katherine’s boss was chewing her out for being away from
her desk for twenty minutes twice a day and demanded to know where she went.
Her answer? To the bathroom ten blocks away because there weren’t any ‘colored
restrooms’ any closer. I won’t spoil the scene for you if you haven’t seen the movie,
other than to say she really lite into him with a barrage of words and you
could hear a pin drop with her co-workers and in the theater. My favorite line
in the barrage was words to the effect: “I work like a DOG and I don’t even get paid enough to
buy the only piece of jewelry the employee handbook says I can wear!”

It’s been an interesting week. I also went to a lecture at the senior hall
billed as “Cultural Education: Radical Islam and Refugees.” A refugee is
defined as someone who flees their homeland due to war, political upheaval or
natural disasters with only what that they can carry. Today, there are 65
million people who are classified as refugees (one in every 100 people on
earth). The speaker talked about how during the Bosnia carnage they even booby-trapped
mass graves to keep people from paying their respects and how during the 90
days of genocide in Rwanda over one million people were slaughtered. Today, the
largest refugee camp in the world is in Kenya a literal tent city that houses
500,000 people from Africa and the Middle East. The Kenya government wants to close the camp (Dadaab as it’s
called) but repatriation
and resettlement of that many people is a complex problem that will take a lot
of time, international help and diplomacy.

Thus enters the humanitarian groups that help refugees
relocate around the world. The speaker was from one of those groups that goes
over to refugee camps to dig deep water wells, build micro-small
health clinics and they distribute solar powered audio Bibles in dozens of
different languages. They also sponsor refugees who come here to the States. I
was surprised to learn that my city is the most prolific place in the country
to sponsor Syrian and Somalian refugee families.

Saturday, January 21, 2017

The luncheon at the senior hall got canceled this week but
when I got up that morning I didn’t check their website or look for district school
closings on TV that triggers that to happen. It was rainy and gloomy but
the temperature was a couple of degrees over 32 so it never occurred to me that ice or fog might
have been an issue earlier in the morning when they have to send the buses out.
Off I went to find the doors to the hall locked up tight and eight or nine
others in the parking lot who’d made the same mistake. “Hell’s bells!” as my
mother used to say---her only foothold in the world of swearing. A local restaurant chain I’ve ordered breakfast in since before I went through menopause was around
the corner, so off I went. I surprised myself and the waitress by ordering the
baked chicken special because it seemed like a comfort food kind of day. It was
good but not like my mother used to make with a can of cream of mushroom soup.
I’ve been craving chicken so much lately that I’m starting to crow like a
rooster looking to get laid. Not funny? Not accurate? Sorry, I know nothing
about the sex life of poultry. I do know my chicken cravings caused me to sign
up for a two-hour cooking class on what you can do with store-bought rotisserie
chickens. Apparently there is more than making soup.

The dollar store was my next stop. It's close to home and I often
stop there when I’ve got no place else to go thus wasting getting all spiffed
up for just a hour’s worth of time away from the house. (I used to joke about
my dad’s girlfriend who, when I chauffeured them around on their dates, always
wanted to go to the dollar store. Now that I’m the age she was back then, I get
it. I get that sometimes a lady just needs to go shopping someplace where she
can’t be tempted to spend more than a $1.98.) But Bill Murray, that prolific
recording artist of Vaudeville fame---be still my heart---summed it up better
when he sang: “When you're all dressed up and have no place to go, how you long
for someone near you, just to cheer you, just to dear you. It’s when you’ll
understand the meaning of that little word ‘lonesome’ when you’re all dressed
up and have no place to go.”

Change of topic. Levi has a birthday coming up soon, his
ninth, which meant he got to go shopping at Chow Hound to use the birthday
money/coupon they sent him. We picked out a new collar and some peanut butter
bones that usually make him barf. He got to smell the rabbits and cats in
cages and the other dogs shopping. He loves Chow Hound and it’s sad that his
mom (that would be me) doesn’t take him more often. When he’s along on shopping
trips it cost more because Chow Hound puts all the plush toys, smelly pig parts
and flavored treats down low where the dogs can grab them. With Levi’s long
Schnauzer beard and mustache he always manages to smuggle something up to the
checkout line where he’ll be coerced to drop it long enough for the cashier to
scan it. Thankfully, he waits until I get the plastic off the contraband
(usually a peanut butter bone) before he eats it.

After Chow Hound we went to Starbucks where Levi got a
puppuccino and I got a cappuccino. I get my drink free around my birthday but
he gets his “drink” free any day of the year. After I pulled out of the
drive-thru line I had to park the car to hold his cup while Levi licked up the
cream. By the time he’d finished off the puppuccino his beard and mustache were
white with cream. But he was happy and raring to go to the third place on his
birthday tradition list: the car wash. Some dogs hate the car wash, others love
it and Levi is in the latter group. When my husband was alive the three of us
used to sing our way through the place but I can’t make Levi howling the way
Don could.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

A cousin of my husband’s died, a super nice guy who’d been
with the police department for thirty-two years. He was eighty-two. At the time
of his retirement he was running the pistol range and teaching newbie cops how to
shoot. The funeral service was in a church and I’ve never seen so many awards
and recognition plaques in my life. They were everywhere---on the altar, a side
table and every window ledge. He was a true, community service kind of guy who
loved working with young people. When one of his daughters got up to read a
list of qualities she admired about her dad I thought, wow, I could have written the exact, same list about my dad! Never
raised his voice, wise, taught ethics by example, loyal, patient, could fix
anything---right down to them both having a sweet tooth. When his grandson described how his grandpa taught him how to fish and row a
boat it was
exactly what one of my nieces said at my dad’s memorial. No wonder I always
liked this guy!

His widow greeted everyone coming in and when I said I was sorry
to hear about his passing, she replied, “Don’t be! He lived a full and happy
life.” She was so ‘together’ I was actually shocked. They’d been together fifty-nine
years and had a best-friends-and-soulmates kind of marriage that was obvious to
anyone in their presence. I was also shocked to learn that they were founding
members of their church and very active in it. It was one of those churches
that believes if you haven’t accepted Jesus as your savior, there’s no way in
hell you’re getting into heaven but in all the years I’ve known this couple they
kept their faith close to their vests. You have to admire people who live their
faith but don’t try to push it on others. I couldn’t say the same for their
minister---duh, that’s his job to push and preach---who’s theme for the day was
“only Jesus can complete you.” I didn’t enjoy that part of the service and I
wish he had explained why it ended with five gunshots and an equal number of
bells ringing out. There were uniformed police officers there, so I do get the
gun salute part, just not the significance of the bells or the number five.

At the luncheon that followed I sat at a table with five rabid
Trump supporters---nephews and nieces of Don’s---who’d been posting anti-Hillary,
pro-Trump stuff on Facebook throughout the primary and general elections. Even the
morning of the funeral one of gals posted a meme about how Trump was going to
"heal our nation and bring us all together" and I cynically thought, what kind of a fairy tale do you live in? Wouldn’t
you know it, she wanted me to sit next to her at the luncheon. It helps, sometimes,
to be an old person wearing hearing aids because you can get away with ignoring
directions you don’t want to follow. No one brought up politics, thank goodness,
although there is one person in the Gang of Five who is notorious for doing so
at family gatherings…while his wife kicks him under the table. I must be a bad
person because I can’t wait until these people figure out that Obamacare and
the Affordable Care Act are one and the same. Several of them were able to get
insurance for the first time in years through the ACA resulting in them getting
some much need medical care and surgeries. Ya, I know someone reading this is
thinking that the Republicans will pass a replacement bill that will be better
and I’m thinking that I get to use the words “fairy tale” twice in the same paragraph.